Electric fireplaces work by producing the flame effects and heat separately.
There’s no real fire in an electric fireplace and so the look of flickering flames is generated using a combination of lights and rotating mirrors.
The flame effects don’t produce any heat and so an electric fireplace will use a form of heater to generate supplementary heat.
You can read more about how electric fireplaces work here, which shows in detail how our own electric fireplace stove works.
An electric fireplace typically incorporates one of two types of heaters:
- Fan forced heaters
- Infrared heaters
Some models of electric fireplace may also use a ceramic heater, but fan and infrared heaters are the most common, with fan heaters being found in the majority of fireplaces.
The two main components of a fan forced heater include a heating element and a blower.
An electric fireplace fan forced heater works much like a conventional home space heater, where a blower pulls in cooler air and forces the air over a heating element that generates warmer air for the room.
The heating element is typically located in front of the blower and a fan forced heater is typically located near the top or the bottom of an electric fireplace.
We have an electric fireplace stove that uses a fan forced heater to generate the heat. The heater is located at the base of the unit and sticks down from underneath.
Here’s what the heater looks like from the inside of our electric stove:
In our particular model of electric fireplace the heating element is located just in front of the blower, and can be seen working in the photo below which was taken while the heater was operating.
All electric fireplaces that use a fan heater will have a heating element.
Electric fireplaces that use another form of heater such as infrared or ceramic will not have a traditional heating element.